Hack Tennessee 7

In addition to the aforementioned apps that I worked on last week and today, I also spent my weekend at Hack Tennessee. It was a tremendous experience and did a lot to make this all feel more "for real"-- I worked with employed developers and contributed to a complete Rails project that is now finished and on the web:

http://www.snacktn.com/

Many NSS students and former students were involved in its creation. The concept came from Ayumi Bennett, an NSS cohort 8 student (I'm cohort 9)-- it's a way to browse and learn about local foods made in Tennessee. The backend (Ruby on Rails) was handled by Robert Fryman and he also served as the project manager-- really knew his stuff, made sure that the rest of us were able to follow along with what was going on with the backend, and made absolutely sure that everyone had something to contribute to. Great experience working with him and the rest of the group.

I enjoyed working with Rails given that it was what I was studying before diving headfirst into all the frontend tech. at NSS (after which we'll do Node.JS); I'd hoped that I'd be able to remember enough to be useful, and ultimately, I was! I made the layout & buttons that appear when you click one of the four main buttons or "view subcategories"-- basically, wherever you see the blue boxes that grow a bit when you hover over them.

http://www.snacktn.com/

The big learning experiences for me were getting all the gems installed, working with postgresql and using git for a project with this many contributors. These were all pretty new to me and definitely things that I need to get familiar with. I also wrote html.erb files for the first time in quite a while, which took some time to remember but was ultimately quite straightforward.

Had a great time! The winner of the event was a virtual-reality psychedelic unicycle game. Which, I mean, was inevitable from the moment it was announced. Also its presentation was fantastic-- I don't remember the gentleman's name, but he had a Jobs-esque way of making me feel that I needed his product in my life.